|
Article Excerpt
On February 4, 1915, the Imperial German government announced the establishment of a war zone in the waters surrounding the British Isles. (1) In that zone, German submarines would sink Allied ships on sight, and because the Allies frequently used neutral flags to disguise their ships, the Germans warned that neutral ships might also be in danger and would be wise to avoid the zone. The announcement was a direct challenge to the Allies' economic lifeline, but it was scarcely less a threat to neutrals like the United States, for whom trade with the Allies had become an economic necessity.
Considering how important were the American interests that German submarine warfare jeopardized, it might be expected that the United States government would have given the proclamation its fullest and most careful consideration before responding. But that was not the case. For a number of reasons, American leaders were unable to see the implications of the German announcement and to react appropriately to the challenge. Although the technology represented by the submarine had revolutionized warfare, the United States answered the German announcement by demanding that German submarines obey rules that had been developed in the 18th century to govern the behavior of sailing ships. In responding as they did, they surrendered to Germany the ability to decide whether and when the United States would enter the war. Unless the Germans gave up submarine warfare completely, the choice of war or peace lay in the hands of every submarine commander peering through his periscope at a dimly seen silhouette on the horizon.
Little evidence was ever found to support the contention of isolationists in the 1930s that bankers and munitions makers maneuvered the United States into the war, but there can be little doubt that economic and emotional ties to the Allies made a suspension of trade with Britain and France unlikely, no matter what the risks. (2) Those same ties also made it virtually certain that if the United States entered the war, it would do so on the Allied side. Yet it is wrong to believe that because American leaders were sympathetic toward the Allies, they deliberately led the country into war. As Arthur Link pointed out, the evidence is strong that "Wilson tried sincerely to pursue policies of rigid neutrality toward the Entente Allies," that he "was not influenced by considerations of immediate national security," and that "he believed that American interests, to say nothing of the interests of mankind, would be best protected by a negotiated peace without victory." In the end, Link concludes, Wilson's decision for war was the result of his conviction that there was no other means available to protect American rights on the high seas, and his belief that the war was in its final stages and could be brought to a speedier end by American participation. (3)
The weakness of Link's argument is that it accepts too easily Wilson's contention that there was no other way to protect American interests than to go to war. As John A. Thompson has pointed out in a recent biography of Wilson, however, there was an alternative, one that the generation of the 1930s found perfectly acceptable: the surrender of the right of American ships to pass through the war zone. (4) Considering that the United States had few merchant vessels of its own when the war began, and that the British controlled the seas until early 1917, a "cash and carry" policy such as that legislated by Congress in the mid-1930s would have curtailed American trade with the Allies very little and might have made it politically feasible to issue a warning to Americans that they would travel in the war zone at their own risk. Such a policy was in fact considered in the spring of 1915, but only after the government had declared that it would insist on the right of Americans and their ships to travel anywhere on the high seas without regard to the conditions of war. By then, it was too late.
The problem with the American policy toward submarine warfare that was set in February 1915 was not that it was necessarily wrong, but that it was determined almost casually, without careful analysis either of its implications or of any alternatives. Historians have been too ready to take Wilson at his word when he declared in April 1917 that there was no alternative to war and thus have not looked carefully enough at the combination of people and events that contributed to the February 1915 policy declaration.
Whether or not Wilson ever actually said, on the eve of his inauguration, that it would be "an irony of fate" if his administration had to focus on foreign issues, it was certainly true that he had thought very little about foreign policy, either as a scholar or as a presidential candidate. (5) His attention was fixed firmly on domestic reform, and his advisers, including Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, concurred with that priority. By the late summer of 1914, when World War I began in Europe, the last major element of Wilson's "New Freedom" program, antitrust legislation, was nearing passage in Congress. Until that was complete, administration leaders had little interest in events outside the United States.
The only one of Wilson's advisers whose focus was not almost exclusively domestic was Colonel Edward M. House. Unburdened by a position in the administration, House recognized far sooner than most Americans how dangerous the European situation was becoming, and in the spring of 1914 he went to Europe to explore the possibility of promoting an Anglo-German accommodation on naval armaments. Wilson paid little attention to House's effort, writing atone point in response to a report from House about a meeting with British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey that he hoped the colonel was "getting a lot of fun and pleasure out of these things." A few days later he sent vague "congratulations" for the way House was "serving the country we love and the peace of the world." (6)
Perhaps Wilson would have taken House's efforts more seriously had one of House's more important reports not been lost in a mix-up, but it is not likely. (7) Europe's controversies seemed very distant from America in the summer of 1914, and Wilson's attention was fully occupied not only by the progress of his program in Congress, but by the rapidly deteriorating health of his wife. On August 4, two days before her death, he sent an offer to the European capitals "to act in the interest of European peace" in any way he could, but the offer was hardly more than pro forma. His personal attitude, as well as that of the nation, was more accurately expressed by the proclamation of neutrality he issued the same day. (8)
Ellen Wilson's death plunged the president into a depression in which he could barely function and from which he was slow to recover. "How hard, how desperately hard" it was to go on with his duties, he wrote to a friend. In November, a few days after midterm congressional elections returned the Democrats to power with reduced majorities, he declared privately that he had lost his interest in politics and had no desire to run for a second term. (9) Depression weighed him down throughout the autumn of 1914 and into early 1915. Then, after he met a charming widow, Edith Bolling Galt, and began to fall in love, another less serious form of distraction began to affect him. If in the one case he was too paralyzed by grief to think clearly about foreign policy, in the other he may have been inclined in the euphoria of new love to be too optimistic.
House's lament that during the autumn of 1914 Wilson seemed to be "singularly lacking in appreciation of the importance of this European crisis ..." was confirmed by Ray Stannard Baker, later Wilson's first major biographer. Baker paid a call on the president at the White House on September 17 and found him almost wholly preoccupied with domestic issues. The president's attitude, he observed, mirrored that of the American public, which he described as "not only uninformed, but largely uninterested" about the situation in Europe. (10) The Literary Digest, which polled 367 newspaper editors in November on their papers' attitudes toward the war, found them in favor of neutrality by a two to one margin, while an article in Current Opinion argued that the war had actually made politicians less rather than more likely to debate foreign policy during the congressional campaign. (11) Secretary of State Bryan, whose position if not his inclination made him responsible for foreign policy, spent part of September on vacation in North Carolina and most of October out of touch with the State Department while he campaigned for Democratic congressional candidates. His absences illustrated the prevailing belief in the administration and the country that there were no major issues arising from the war that needed the attention of policymakers.
With Bryan away and Wilson distracted, control over American policy toward the belligerents fell largely into the hands of the Counselor of the State Department, Robert Lansing. A slender, dignified, graying man of 50, Lansing brought long experience in international law to the department when he joined it in Match 1914. Physically and temperamentally he presented a striking contrast to Secretary Bryan, and although he was nominally a Democrat, his conservative outlook would probably have prevented his appointment except for House's sponsorship. By temperament Lansing was a realist, and by experience he was accustomed to seeking practical accommodations of conflicts. Twenty years of involvement in negotiating settlements of conflicts with Great Britain had given him confidence that most disagreements could be compromised as well as a strong admiration for the English, but his Anglophilia was tempered with a caution that British Ambassador Cecil Arthur Spring Rice characterized as "the lawyer's instinct to make good his case." Although studious, thoughtful, and well informed, Lansing was neither imaginative nor daring. In the state department he was the ideal man to implement standard policies but not one to quickly grasp unprecedented situations and respond creatively to them. (12)
In Bryan's absence, Lansing became the policymaker during the autumn of 1914 on a series of minor but cumulatively important issues. Treating each as separate from the others and failing to consider their collective impact on American policy, Lansing sought practical accommodations of what he viewed as technical problems. Because all of the issues had to do with Anglo-American relations, his compromises gradually moved the United States from impartial neutrality toward a position that slightly favored the Allies--or at least one that the Germans perceived as...
|
